What do I think or get up to as an Oracle Professional, UKOUG Volunteer, ACE Director?
These are my personal views

Monday, 2 June 2008

If you can't beat them....

For the last few years I have chaired the Product Development Committee of the International Oracle Usergroup Community IOUC http://www.iouc.org/ and one of our main focuses has been on Fusion.

To begin with Fusion was just for Applications, and technical Oracle folk were completely turned off. But we could quickly see that it was about the technology it would be written in. Getting this message out was a big challenge and one we undertook by getting the applications community to look at the technology. Initiatives like the Oracle Excellence Awards at last years Open World look to showcase Application Customers who have embraced Fusion technology, and bloggers such as Floyd Teter OAUG http://orclville.blogspot.com/ go a long way towards this.

But what about the technical community not aligned to Oracle Applications? One of our members George Trujillo http://web.mac.com/george.trujillo/ from IOUG had raised concerns that the technical community managers don't understand Fusion and what it means and therefore they are not investing in the training required.

My own contribution is to give user group presentations on the evolution of the Fusion message, so that people can see its relevance. The audience has almost always been applications and it has been well received.

My last outing was the OUGF (Finland) http://http://www.ougf.fi/ 20th anniversary conference last month. This conference was held on a boat sailing between Helsinki and Stockholm, idyllic. The applications stream was very small and I did not expect many to show up but I was pleasantly surprised, a fair number of the technical people turned up to see what it was about, and I got very positive feedback including some from Oracle themselves.

So the moral of the story? Talk to techies, they are not all that bad :)